Branded Part 14

"Ye've guessed it ag'in."

"You didn't want the bosses to be robbed?"

The escaped convict had his face propped between his hands with his elbows resting on his knees.

"I'm thinkin' maybe it's six o' one and a half-dozen o' tother," he said soberly. "I wasn't carin' so d.a.m.ned much about the bosses, square as they've been to me. But I puts it up like this: here's you, and you'd spotted me, and you hadn't snitched; you'd been in 'stir'

yourself, and knowed what it was: d'ye see?"

I smiled in the darkness. It was the brotherhood of the underworld.

"And you lined up square at the finish, too, as I knowed yous would,"

he went on. "You sees me pipin' yous off in town, and you was thinkin'

maybe I'd drop in here to-night and crack this old box f'r the swag there'd be in it. You laid f'r me alone, because yit you wouldn't be willin' to give me up. Ain't that the size of it, pally?"

"You've guessed it," I said, handing his own words back to him. "And now one more question, Dorgan: have you quit the crooked business for keeps?"

He was up and moving toward the open window when he replied.

"Who the h.e.l.l would know that? I was a railroad man, pally, before I took to the road. These days I'm eatin' my t'ree squares and sleepin'

good. But some fine mornin' a little man that I could break in halves wit' my two hands 'll come dancin' along wit' a paper in his pocket and a gun in his fist; and then it'll be all over but the shoutin'--or the fun'ral. There's on'y the one sure thing about it, pally: I'll not be goin' back to 'stir'--not alive; d'ye see? So long . . . don't let them ducks get loose on yous and come at yous fr'm behind, whilst maybe you'd be dozin' off."

And with this parting injunction he was gone.

XII

A Cast for Fortune

The incident of the frustrated safe robbery was an incident closed, so far as any difference in Dorgan's att.i.tude toward me was concerned, at the moment when he disappeared through the open window of the pay-office. For the next two or three weeks I saw him only as he chanced to drop into the commissary of an evening; and upon such occasions he ignored me absolutely.

Only once more while the work of branch-line building continued did we have speech together. It was in the evening of a day when the new line, then nearly completed, had been honored with visitors; a car-load of them up from Denver in some railway official's private hotel-on-wheels. It so happened that my duties had taken me up to the actual end-of-track--by this time some miles beyond our headquarters camp at Flume Gulch--and I was there when the special, with its observation platform crowded with sightseers, came surging and staggering up over the uneven track of the new line.

I paid little attention to the one-car train as it pa.s.sed me, save to note that there were women among the railroad official's guests. The sightseers were quite outside of my purview--or within it only as temporary hindrances to a job we were all pushing at top speed. A short distance beyond me the train came to a stand in the midst of Dorgan's crew and I saw some of the people getting off the car. Just then a construction engine came along on the siding, and, my errand to the front being accomplished, I flagged it and went back to headquarters.

As I have said, Dorgan dropped into the commissary that evening. His ostensible errand was to buy some tobacco, but after he had filled his pipe he lingered until the sleepy commissary clerk began to turn the loiterers out preparatory to closing the place for the night. It was then that Dorgan gave me a sign which I rightly interpreted; when I released the catch of the pay-office door he slipped in and sat down on the cot where he would be out of sight of those in front. Here he smoked in sober silence until Crawford, the commissary man, had gone out and locked the door on the empty storeroom.

"I was wantin' to tip yez off," was the way he began, after we had the needful privacy. "You'd be after seein' that kid-glove gang up at the front this mornin'?"

I nodded.

"Know anybody in that bunch?"

"I didn't notice them particularly," I replied. "I understood they were Denver people--friends of somebody in the railroad management."

"There was women," he said significantly.

"I know; I saw some of them."

"Yes; and be the same token, there was one of them lamped yous off. I listened at her askin' one o' the men who you was; d'ye see?"

Instantly I began to ransack my brain for the possibilities, and almost at once the talk on the train with Horace Barton, the wagon sales manager, flashed into the field of recollection.

"Could you describe the woman for me?" I asked.

Dorgan made hard work of this, though it was evident that he was trying his best. His description would have fitted any one of a round million of American women, I suppose; yet out of it I thought I could draw some faint touches of familiarity. The stumbling description, coupled with Barton's a.s.sertion that Agatha Geddis was living in Colorado, fitted together only too well.

"Did you hear what she said to the man?" I inquired, and my mouth was dry.

"On'y a bit of it. She says, says she: 'Who is that man wit' a French beard--the young man in his shirt-sleeves?' The felly she t'rowed this into was one o' the kid-gloves, and he didn't know. So he went to Shelton, who was showin' the crowd around on the job. When he comes back, he tells her your name is Jim Bertrand, and that you makes a noise like the camp paymaster."

"Well?" I prompted. "Go on."

"She laughs when he says that. 'Jim Bertrand, is it?' says she. 'Will you do me a favor, Mister Jullybird'--'r some such name. 'Go and ask that young man how did he leave all the folks in Glendale. I want to see him jump,' says she. He didn't do it because at that same minute yous was walkin' down the track to flag Benson's ingine."

The bolt had fallen. The woman could have been no other than Agatha Geddis. Once more I stood in critical danger of losing all that I had gained. There was only one faint hope, and that was that she had not heard of the broken parole. I had to go to the water jug in the Commissary and get a drink before I could thank Dorgan for telling me.

"'Tis nothin'," he said shortly. Then, after a protracted pause: "What can she do to yous, pally?"

"She can send me up for two years; and then some--for the penalties."

Again a silence intervened.

"'Twas in the back part o' my head to take a chance and ditch that d.a.m.n' special when she was comin' back down the gulch," said Dorgan, at length, as coolly as if he were merely telling me that his pipe had gone out. "But if I'd done it, it would have been just my crooked luck to 'a' killed everybody on it but that woman. What'll ye be doin'?"

"Nothing at present. We shall finish here in a week or so more, and then I'll see."

That ended it. After Dorgan had got another match for his pipe, I let him out at the side door of the commissary, and he went his way across to the sleeping shacks on the other side of the tracks.

Two weeks later it was this story of the inquisitive young woman, weighing in the balance with some other things, that determined my immediate future course. The work on the branch line was completed, and my employers had taken a dam-building contract in Idaho. I was offered the job of bookkeeper and paymaster, combined, on the new work, with a substantial raise in salary, and the temptation to accept was very strong. But I argued, foolishly, perhaps, that so long as I remained in the same service as that in which she had discovered me, Agatha Geddis would always be able to trace me; that my best chance was to lose myself again as speedily as possible.

The "losing" opportunity had already offered itself. By this time I had made a few acquaintances in town and was beginning to be bitten by the mining bug. Though I was a late comer in the district, and Cripple Creek had fully caught its stride as one of the greatest gold-producing camps in the world some time before my advent, "strikes" were still occurring frequently enough to keep the gold seekers' excitement from dying out. With the greater part of my Hadley-and-Shelton earnings in my pocket, and with muscles camp-hardened sufficiently to enable me to hold my own as a workingman, I decided to take a chance and become a prospector.

We went at it judiciously and with well-considered plans, three of us: the bank teller, Barrett, a young carpenter named Gifford, and myself.

Altogether we could pool less than a thousand dollars of capital, but we determined to make the modest stake suffice. By this time the entire district had been plotted and replotted into mining claims; hence we did our preliminary prospecting in the records of the land office. A careful search revealed a number of infinitesimally small areas as yet uncovered by the many criss-crossing claims; and among these we chose a triangular-shaped bit of mountain side on the farther slope of Bull Mountain, with a mine called the "Lawrenceburg," a fairly large producer, for our nearest neighbor.

There was a good bit of discussion precedent to the making of this decision. Barrett thought that we stood but a slight chance of finding mineral in the over-prospected area. The Lawrenceburg was a full quarter of a mile distant from our triangle, and its "pay-streak" was said to dip southward, while our gulch slope lay on the other side of a spur and due northeast. It was a further examination of the land-office records that turned the scale. Among the numerous unworked claims lying higher up the gulch, beyond and adjoining our proposed location, we found three whose ownership we traced, through a number of transfers apparently designed to hide something, to the Lawrenceburg.

Barrett, a fine, keen-witted young fellow whose real name, if I might give it, would be familiar to everybody in the West, was the first to draw the probable inference.

"Jimmie, you've got the longest head in the bunch," was his comment; this because I had chanced to be the one to make the discovery of the well-concealed ownership. "At some period in the history of the Lawrenceburg, which is one of the oldest mines on Bull Mountain, its owners have had reason to believe that their pay streak was going to run the other way--to the northeast. They undertook to cover the chance by making these locations quietly, and through 'dummy' locators, on the other side of the spur."

"But how did they come to overlook this patch we're figuring on?" asked Gifford, the carpenter.

"That was somebody's blunder," Barrett offered. "These section plats we have been studying may have been made after the locations were staked out; in all probability that was the case. That sort of thing happens easily in a new country like this. It was an oversight; you can bet to win on that. If those Lawrenceburg people had any good business reason for locating these claims beyond us, they had precisely the same reason for covering this intervening bit of ground that we are going to grab."

Gifford took fire at once; and if I didn't it was only because we were not yet in possession, and I thought there might be many chances for a slip between the cup and the lip. This talk took place at night in Barrett's room in town, and before we separated our plans were fully made. Gifford and I were to start at once--that night, mind you--for Bull Mountain to locate a claim which should cover as completely as possible the entire area of the irregular triangle. The location made, the carpenter and I were to work the claim as a two-man proposition.

Barrett was to retain his place in the bank, so that the savings from his salary might add more capital. We even went so far as to christen our as yet unborn mine. Since we were picking up--or were going to pick up--one of the unconsidered fragments after the big fellows had taken their fill of the loaves and fishes, we proposed to call our venture "The Little Clean-Up."